Question: Do you think visiting high schools will help decrease the number of obese people?

well, funny you ask because I have thought a lot about this. I think it might help decrease obesity for the future generation (you guys), if you understand a bit more about how people get fat and how to prevent it. Probably a stupid example, but you can’t really watch a game of cricket or footy game without understanding the rules. Or you can’t really bake bread until you get told the ingredients and how to do it! Same with weight loss. Most will have heard about diet & exercise, but don’t understand how to do it properly and how their body works…..

There is a lot of stuff I really didn’t know until I started working in this lab!

One example is calories. You know how they talk a lot about calorie intake and diets etc, but if people don’t understand what a calorie is, how many they should have in a day or how to read the nutritional information on the side of a box of cereal or can of coke, it doesn’t mean anything to them.

So my ideas are to
1) teach you guys about calories, how many you need and how to understand how many there are in foods you eat
2) explain simply which organs in the body are involved with eating (the stomach, the guts, your fat tissue AND THE BRAIN)
3) how you can lose weight effectively and safely
4) how to increase your overal metabolism (burning of energy)
5) and answer any questions you might have

The thing is (and I know because I have tried diets), people can’t stay on diets for long because their body (their brain actually) will force them to eat! If you don’t eat enough calories, your brain notices this and will get quite upset. It will then slow down your metabolism and make you want to eat food. So many people on diets are constantly trying to fight against their own brain. And that is why they usually gain all the weight again after they finish a diet!
I also know a few tricks that can help people burn more energy that have nothing to do with exercise.

More than 50% of adults and 17% of kids and teenagers in Australia are overweight or obese. Every year there are more fat people. And you know what kills the most people in Australia every year?? Cardiovascular disease (heart attacks and strokes) and cancer, and both are partly caused by being overweight. So if we can teach you guys how to live well (and still have your chocolate), we can decrease obesity and we can prevent a lot of deaths from cardiovascular disease and cancer!